Italy’s parliament on Tuesday approved a law that introduces femicide into the country’s criminal law and punishes it with life in prison.
The vote coincided with the international day for the elimination of violence against women, a day designated by the U.N. General Assembly.
The law won bipartisan support from the center-right majority and the center-left opposition in the final vote in the Lower Chamber, passing with 237 votes in favor.
The law, backed by the conservative government of Premier Giorgia Meloni, comes in response to a series of killings and other violence targeting women in Italy. It includes stronger measures against gender-based crimes including stalking and revenge porn.
I read about it during my lunch break. Turns out, it’s just another sexist law applied by a conservative government.
If that’s your takeaway you need help
If you’re unable to process that the penalty for killing someone should not vary based on their gender, you, and the conservative government of Italy need help.
Please explain the sexism.
In order for a murder to be femicide, it specifically needs to be perpetrated by a man and the victim needs to be a woman. Any other combination =/= femicide. In Italy now, femicide has a mandatory minimum sentence of life in prison. Murder has a mandatory minimum sentence of 21 years. A woman is inherantly 100% immune from being charged with Femicide by definition of the word. Thus, kill a man in Italy the mandatory minimum sentence is 21 years. Kill a woman in Italy, the mandatory minimum sentence is 21 years but in some cases the mandatory minimum is life in prison. It’s an unequal application of penalty based on gender… sexism.
inexact and unnecessarily emotive. You’ve hinged your argument on a fallacy. Femicide requires very specific circumstances to be surrounding the crime of murder
Are you planning on killing women for misogynistic reasons? Are you planning on taking domestic abuse to its all too comment conclusion? Are you, in short, planning on committing murderous hate crimes? No? Then this consequence does not apply.
What fallacy? There will never be a male victim of femicide. It’s not possible by the very definition of the word.
Concur. The circumstances require the perpetrator to be male and the victim to be female… along with everything else you mentioned. None the less, because of the first requirement (gender specificity) it is explicitly and intentionally discriminating on the basis of gender; which is textbook sexism.
How.
We are discussing murder victims here. They are not receiving preferential treatment. They are dead.
By the very definition of the word. The victim can only be female. That is an inherent discriminating point.
We’re not talking about the victim; we’re talking about the crime… the act of murder itself. Murder is a broad category and it covers everyone of all genders. Femicide is a specific type of murder that only applies under certain circumstances; but one of those circumstances requires the victim to be female. That is a gender based discriminating factor.
It’s nothing about “preferential treatment;” it’s about having different outcomes because of an intentional and explicit consideration based on gender.